88 /-87 to /-90
symmetry of their shapes and sizes and positions and orderings; and in
this way it comes about that the origin of compounds is produced.
Alexander of Aphrodisias On Mixture
214.28-215.8 (290 U)
[1-88]Epicurus wanted to avoid what Democritus said followed for those
who say that blending occurs by means of the juxtaposition of the compo-
nents of the blend, and himself said that blending occurs by means of the
juxtaposition of certain bodies, though not of bodies which are themselves
mixed and [still] preserved in the division, (215) but rather of bodies
that are broken down into elements and atoms from which each of [those
bodies] is a sort of compound, one being wine, another water, another
honey, another something else; and then he says that the blend occurs
by a certain kind of reciprocal compounding of those bodies from which
the components of the blend were constituted; and it is these which
produce the blended body, not the water and the wine, but [it is] the
atoms which make up the water, as one might call them, which are
blended together with those which make up the wine by a destruction
and generation of certain [bodies]. For the breakdown of each into its
elements is a form of destruction, and the compounding produced from
the elements themselves is .
Sextus M 10.219-227 (294 U) [1-89]
- According to the account of Demetrius of Laconia, Epicurus says
that time is a property of properties which accompanies days and nights
and hours and feelings and absences of feeling and motions and states
of rest. For all of these are accidental properties of certain things, and
since it accompanies all of these, time would not unreasonably be called
a property of properties. 220. For in general, to go back a bit in order
to promote the comprehension of our argument, some existing things
exist in their own right while others are observed to be dependent on
things which exist in their own right. And the things which exist in their
own right are things like substances (for example, body and void), while
their so-called accidents are the things observed to be dependent on the
things which exist in their own right. 221. Of these accidents, some are
inseparable from that of which they are the accidents, and some are of
such a nature as to be separated. Those which are inseparable from that
of which they are the accidents, then, are, for example, resistance [as an
accident] of body and yielding [as an accident] of void. 222. For a body
cannot ever be thought of without resistance, nor can void be thought
of without yielding; rather, resistance is a permanent accident of the one